The Tim Ferriss Show - #491: Dr. Stefi Cohen — 25 World Records, Power Training, Deadlifting 4.4x Bodyweight, Sports Psychology, Overcoming Pain, and More

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Starting point is 00:05:34 you can claim a free Element sample pack. You only cover the cost of shipping. For US customers, this means you can receive an eight-count sample pack for just $5. Simply go to drinkelement.com slash Tim. That's drinkelement.com slash Tim to claim your free eight count sample pack. One more time, that's drinkelement.com slash Tim for this exclusive offer. drinkelement.com slash Tim. Check it out. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and attempt to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types from all different fields. My guest today, Steffi Cohen, S-T-E-F-I Cohen, on Instagram, at Steffi Cohen. She is a 25-time world record holding powerlifter and

Starting point is 00:06:46 the first woman in the history of the sport to deadlift 4.4 times her body weight. We will give some examples of what that might mean. I weigh around 170 pounds. So that means I have to deadlift, I think around 748 pounds. I've got a ways to go, but we're not going to turn this into my therapy session just yet. Steffi is a doctor of physical therapy, author, podcast host, and business owner, passionately educating people with her evidence-based view on all things training and nutrition. She's the co-owner of Hybrid Performance Method, where hundreds of thousands of strength seekers go monthly to find progressive strength training and nutrition programs, plus tons of free articles and videos.

Starting point is 00:07:22 Steffi is a creative mind, loves collaborating with the hybrid team and partners to develop powerful content, inspired fashion, and both fitness and nutrition tools for a stronger life. Her new book is Back in Motion, which we will certainly talk about at one point. And you can find her all over the place. Website, hybridperformancemethod.com. Instagram, if you want to be both impressed, astonished, maybe feel like you need to put in some more work, you can go to Instagram forward slash Steffi Cohen. Again, that's S-T-E-F-I. You can find her on YouTube easily. She has podcast Hybrid Unlimited. Steffi, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here. I'm excited to have you on. I've been texting with some mutual friends of

Starting point is 00:08:05 ours. I want to give credit where credit is due to Matt Vincent for initially suggesting that this happened. So for those who don't know Matt, incredible athlete, Highland Games and beyond, also an all-around wacky, hilarious character who, despite being built like a grizzly bear, can also out mountain bike me over many, many hundreds of miles, which really broke my spirit. But that's a separate story. Is that so? That is so. Yeah, I was like, he's going to look like a bear on a tricycle. Definitely, I won't be in last place. He just had knee surgery and then smoked, completely smoked me.

Starting point is 00:08:38 Kelly Starrett also. And I have an embarrassment of riches here in terms of questions for you, because I have done my homework, I believe, and there are an infinite number of directions we can go. I thought we would start, and I very rarely start biographically, but I think here it could be interesting. At least it's my curiosity. Where were you born, and what was your childhood like? I was born in Caracas, Venezuela. This is South America. I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, South America. I was born, I'm a Venezuelan Jew. So I was born in a very traditional household.

Starting point is 00:09:11 Most of my childhood, I spent playing soccer. I played soccer for the national Venezuelan soccer team, which sounds a lot more impressive than what it actually was like. There was not a lot of funding from the government for professional sports back home. So we kind of played in dirt fields. We played in a field that was located at the military base, which was interesting. Traveling in the inner parts of the country was super eye-opening for me,

Starting point is 00:09:40 given that I come from a more kind of like sheltered family environment. You know, my dream with soccer was always to get into a D1 team or play professional soccer. I really wanted to play professionally in any capacity for a long time. Ended up moving to the States, looking for a soccer scholarship, moved to San Diego. And I guess I don't know how far you want me to go there, but that's where I come from. Yeah, we're going to go pretty far with it. For those who have never been to Venezuela, you're actually the second Venezuelan-born guest I've had on the show. The first is Jason Silva, who is, Venezuelano. And I would love to just hear you describe what your experience was like, or rather, the reasons for leaving Venezuela and at what age?

Starting point is 00:10:33 I don't have many memories of Venezuela as a, you know, peaceful, tranquil, friendly country. When I was already growing up, when I was 10, 12, the country started getting pretty dangerous. There was a lot of political and economical unrest. There was a lot of divide between social classes. There was a lot of corruption, dictatorship disguised as a socialist government. Growing up there is very differently than anything in any other country, really like talking about bulletproof cars. I'm talking about bodyguards talking about, you know, the fear of constant fear. Anytime you get out of your house to either be kidnapped, either be shot, either be armed, robbed, either be, I don't know, taken into your house and getting everything stolen from you.

Starting point is 00:11:23 So it's a very kind of high stress, high alert way to live. And I guess when you don't know, taken into your house and getting everything stolen from you. So it's a very kind of high stress, high alert way to live. And I guess when you don't know anything better, that just kind of becomes your norm, right? When you grow up in an environment, that's a certain way you just grow up to accept that that's just, I guess, how the world works. So very sheltered, you know, you, you're always kind of spending time within the same groups with the same people, uh, going to and from the same places, uh, not really like socializing much outside of that. You live in a, in your little kind of crystal ball essentially. And at the time, I think this was 1998 or 2002. I can't remember which one of those elections was when there was a civil war. Chavez,

Starting point is 00:12:07 the president at that time, didn't win the elections and there was this huge civil war. A ton of people died. My dad was in the protest. I went to the protest. It was very graphic. It was a very interesting time to live and very interesting experience as well. And I guess that's when that all happened. And I guess Chavez got back into power somehow, even though he wasn't elected by the people. At that time, it was very clear to me and my family that there was just not going to be anything that could save that country, right? The wrong people are in power and the wrong people will seemingly continue to be in power. And there's nothing that anybody can do. So I actually was one of the first of kind of my circle of friends to venture out of the country and make the decision to move out of the country.

Starting point is 00:12:56 It was a time where, you know, people were still a little bit optimistic. There were elections coming up again. There were some things to look forward to, but my mom didn't want to take the risk. And she was actually the one that encouraged me to apply for a scholarship in the U S and, and to make the decision to move, which was very difficult, especially given that, you know, how I said that when you live in such a sheltered environment, stepping outside of that kind of comfort zone is terrifying. It makes you feel really vulnerable and afraid, I guess. So I was 17 when I moved out of Venezuela and it was tough because at that time, like I said, we were still optimistic that things could get better.

Starting point is 00:13:36 So it almost felt like I was giving up on my country. I'm very patriotic about my country. So, you know, I'm assuming like a lot of people are. When you grow up in a country, you develop emotions and sentiment towards the place that you grew up that gave you everything. I felt like I was giving up on my country and felt bad for a little bit. But then the country just continued to trend downwards into what it is today, which is absolutely awful and 20 times worse than what it was when I left 10 years ago. Where did you land when you first moved to the US? I landed in Miami. It's actually a funny story. I was so upset that my mom convinced me to move. And we were in the shuttle at the airport, at the Miami International Airport.

Starting point is 00:14:19 And I was just crying hysterically. If you didn't know what was happening, you could have sworn that my mom was kidnapping me or something. I was just crying hysterically. Like if you didn't know what was happening, you could have sworn that my mom was kidnapping me or something. I was so mad, maybe not mad at my mom, but mad at the situation, mad that I was forced to leave my country, mad that I had it all. I was a really good soccer player. I was the team captain of the national team. I had a name for myself there.

Starting point is 00:14:42 And I just felt like I was forced out of my country and forced to start over. And it wasn't my decision. It wasn't the route that I really wanted to take. Like I wanted to stay there with my friends, with my family, with my soccer team. Come down, London, Miami. And then I went to San Diego. That's where I wanted to, or initially I got into school. San Diego. beautiful place. Let's flash forward just to not continue sequentially. So we're going to bounce back and forth. Can you please describe for people some of your records and at what body weights those records were achieved? So I guess I'll speak of the most monumental ones or the most historic ones. So I was the first woman to deadlift, I guess, four times my body weight first at a powerlifting

Starting point is 00:15:29 competition. And that was, I weighed 120 pounds and I deadlifted, I guess, over 500. Then I beat that record weighing, again, 120 or 123, deadlifted 545 pounds. You don't really know what your body is capable of until you actually do it. And there's a lot of kind of limitations that are placed upon yourself based on what other people are doing. And so I remember the first time I deadlifted 400 pounds, when I said I was going to deadlift 500 pounds, everyone thought it was crazy, that it was impossible, that there's no way I could do it at that body weight. And then look, magical things happen. And I trained really hard, obviously,

Starting point is 00:16:10 trained intelligently and was able to achieve things that no other woman had ever been capable of doing. And what's interesting to me, and I don't know if maybe there's a name for this phenomenon or something, but after I did that, there were several girls that were able to achieve that 500 pound deadlift mark. As soon as people see that there's something that is humanly possible, it's almost like it gives them the strength or it allows them to be able to chase those same goals. Yeah. It's like Roger Bannister in the four minute mile. Right. Exactly. Same story. Exactly. And yeah, outside of that, I've broken, I guess, 25 world records in powerlifting in three

Starting point is 00:16:50 different weight classes. I've cut down all the way from 135 pounds all the way down to 114, broken squat, deadlift, and total world records there. Broken a few world records in the 123 class and then some in the 132 class. I have also the highest deadlift in that class as well. What are your other lifts? What are some of your other personal best personal records, PRs in say bench, squat, or any other lift that you want to mention? My best squat is 510 pounds at 120 pounds body weight and bench is 240 to 120 as well. Sorry to laugh. I've been having this year, so I may turn this into like a pro bono

Starting point is 00:17:37 consulting session. I'm 43. I've been having this year where like all of these injuries are cropping up. I'm feeling like an older version of Leonardo DiCaprio and the Revenant, dragging one leg behind me like some broken horse. And I'm listening to these numbers. I'm like, you know, I'm sitting in a pretty tall building. I should just throw myself off the deck right now. These are just insane numbers. Now, let me tilt the microscope a bit because I want to ask you, and this might be a way of exploring some of these lifts and explaining what they mean to people. We know quite a few people in common. One of them, you're probably closer to him than I am, but he was in my last book, Tribe of Mentors, Ed Cohn.

Starting point is 00:18:35 So Ed Cohn, could you describe for people who Ed Cohn is and what is most impressive about him to you? I think this will be a way of then coming back to some of your achievements and approaches. Man, Ed is known as the greatest powerlifter of all time. He has that, he's earned that title. He's been given that title by pretty much everyone within the powerlifting community. And I think what separates him from everyone else is just how consistently he was able to show up and perform at his best throughout the years. I don't know how many years he competed, maybe 20 years, which is crazy. Anyone who's ever attempted to get stronger, anyone of any person who's listening to this, just try training for more than two years. When progress starts slowing down, when you start coming into the gym and feeling like crap and not able to perform your best, you start accumulating

Starting point is 00:19:20 injuries. And you know, it takes years for you to see even a five pound increment in any of the lifts, just the amount of mental fortitude, mental strength that you have to have in order to just keep showing up and hoping that what you're doing is taking you closer to your goals or pushing you in the right direction is, is unbelievable. You know, I've spoken to Ed extensively about his mindset and about what some of his training theories were in his training methods. And he pretty much just said that he, I asked him if he ever stopped making progress and he said no. He said anytime my progress would slow down, I would go in and really take a look at what areas of weaknesses I had. And I would tackle them with the same intensity

Starting point is 00:20:07 that I tackle my on season or like the seasons where you're preparing for a powerlifting meet. And he would repeat that over and over and over again. Obviously, look, Ed is not from this world, man. That guy, he's not serious. That is like the pot calling the kettle black a bit. I should also just say real quickly, no relation. You are Cohen, C-O-H-E-N. He is Ed Cohen, C-O-A-N. But yes, he is an alien for sure.

Starting point is 00:20:35 The resiliency his body has and his ability to just tolerate beating his body down with weights is remarkable. It really is. So he's a specimen. I recall a few of the things he said to me when we were chatting. And one was that he would plan out his entire, I want to say season or a year in advance, knowing with absolute certainty that he would be able to make every attempt. And I thought that was really thought-provoking, considering that the way a lot of people train is they may not even take notes at all, but they go into the gym and decide what they're going to do.

Starting point is 00:21:19 Maybe they have some rough outline, but they don't have that type of programming that is laid out in advance. He had a top-down approach to training. He kind of like reverse engineered his program. So he would say, okay, so if I want to deadlift 700 pounds, that means that I have to be able to deadlift 650 for three, which means that I have to do 625 for five. And then he would reverse engineer from there, which I think is really interesting. So you and he seem to be, how should I put this, designed for, obsessed with specialists in the deadlift. I mean, Ed is known for, I can't remember what the lift was, 902 at 200 or 190 or something insane. And you have these ant-like multiples on your, on your lifting. You're just

Starting point is 00:22:08 a human, little, little human female Venezuelan ant. And now there are many people who, we should also take a moment just to explain the deadlift for people. So could you explain the deadlift, what that actually means, and then the competition deadlift, let's just say. And then next, could you tell me what are some of the things that distinguish a person who trains, and I'm just going to leave weight classes out of this for a minute because it'll make it a little complex, but people who say train up to a deadlift of four or 500 pounds versus those people who get, we could look at it as a multiple of body weight, but like someone who gets up to two X body weight versus someone

Starting point is 00:22:49 who gets to three or four times body weight. Like what are the differences in how they approach the deadlift? The deadlift, there's not much to it. There's a bar on the floor and the goal is to pick it up until your leg, your knees and hips are locked out all the way. I think it's one of the most impressive feats of strength. And I think universally speaking, people consider that the ultimate test of strength. That's why it's so celebrated. There's two methods of deadlifting. You can either have a conventional style of deadlift, which is with your hands outside of your feet. And then there's the opposite, which is a sumo deadlift where your hands are inside or within your feet. And that's it as far as what the deadlift is. Yeah. So for a visual for people,

Starting point is 00:23:34 if you imagine, like you said, there is a loaded bar resting on the ground. So it has plates on either end. You walk up to it. If it's conventional stance, then you're going to, again, this is oversimplified, but have your feet just say roughly hip distance apart. And you're going to almost squat down. Again, this is very simplified. And grab the bar with your arms are going to be turned out slightly. They'll be much further apart. And you'll almost look like you're doing a really wide plie from ballet when you go down to grab the bar between your legs. Hands under your shoulders, roughly in both cases. Okay. So then we have all these folks doing God knows what. And eventually they muscle their way to maybe, maybe, maybe a 2x deadlift, right? But perhaps they're not approaching it in a very organized way.

Starting point is 00:24:29 And then you have people who are able to do significantly more, two and a half, three times, and then you get into the rarefied air of doing what you do. How do people make that leap crossing the chasm to those higher weights? What are the things that are different? I think the main thing has to do with its physics, with leverage. Some people are really gifted when it comes to proportions. I think I'm one of them. I think that really makes a difference when it comes to being able to break that two, three, four, five times body weight mark is, is your leverages, your, your proportions. There's a guy, I believe it's in the USAPL who, man, he has a really odd in terms of proportions looking body. He has a

Starting point is 00:25:13 very short, extremely short torso, and he has super long arms. And when he locks out the deadlift, it just seems like the barbell moves just a few inches off, off the ground. And I'm pretty sure that guy's done five times body weight. I'm pretty sure you would have to fact check me on that. Some people, it's genetics, right? Some people can train so hard. If some people can train the exact same way as Ed Cohen, maybe have him as a coach and, and never achieve half of what, what he achieved or never, never lift a quarter of how much Ed lifted. And I think a big part of it is your proportions, your leverages. And then when we get into genetics as well, muscle fiber type composition, your ability to learn new skills, et cetera. Just to kind of draw a circle around the genetics, certainly you have genetics as a huge component, like you mentioned. I mean,

Starting point is 00:26:02 you see a lot of championship bench pressers, at least in the men's category, who have a lot of girth, right? And the distance the bar travels is a real factor, right? So if you can put in a huge arch and also have a gigantic belly on you, then it can be very, very helpful in a lift like the bench press. Or you have someone like Ed Cohn, who is five foot six, but I've seen photographs of him putting his hand against the hands of NBA players, and they have roughly the same size hands, right? That's huge hands, yeah. Yeah. So his ability to hold a standard size bar relative to his body weight is just going to give him incredible advantages. But yeah, I was just going to say,

Starting point is 00:26:45 well, I want you to continue because I've had too much caffeine, but I'd love to draw a circle around the genetics and recognize those for being as important as they are. But then to talk about not the attributes, which people can't mimic, like they're not going to get a muscle fiber transplant, but some of the technologies and approaches and programming

Starting point is 00:27:04 and the methodologies that say you've used, I'd love to talk about. But what were you going to say? Yeah. I think that the more specialized, you know how people, what's that saying? Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Okay. Yeah. That saying. I'm really bad at memorizing sayings and quotes, but you know what I mean? I do. When it comes to powerlifting, you can want it all you want. You can work as hard as you want, but because know what I mean? I do. When it comes to powerlifting, you can want it all you want. You can work as hard as you want, but because it's such a specialized sport, having the right attributes for the sport is even more important. So for example, say you want to be a,

Starting point is 00:27:37 I don't know, a football player. There's many positions within football that might be in line with what your current skills and abilities are. And you might actually be able to outwork your way into a pro team by gaining more speed, by being stronger, by being able to cut sharper by, I don't know, you know, you can gain an advantage in so many different areas or categories within the skills that you need to succeed in football. Whereas in powerlifting, there's really not much. You either have the capability to get stronger or you don't. And you either have the proportions to be able to move the bar in the most efficient way or you don't. True fact, as Kelly Starrett would say. But let's, all right, let me make this even more concrete. So a few years ago, I did a triple with 475 or so on a trap bar. So a hex bar, depending on what term people want to apply.

Starting point is 00:28:37 That at the time, at least training over, say a six or year-long period, doing mostly just pulls to the knees based on a program popularized by a sprint coach named Barry Ross. That was basically my ceiling, right? And I probably weighed 180 at the time, so I'm not winning any multiple awards. But I have very, very small hands. My proportions are not really built, I wouldn't say, terribly well for the deadlift. But I also didn't have a coach. I didn't have any real eye to the detail of training for the deadlift. So if I came to you, I show up with a hobo stick and a little satchel with my lunchbox at your gym, and I'm just like, please, save me. Make me a better deadlifter.

Starting point is 00:29:22 How would you start? I would start by looking at your form, looking at your technique and seeing if there's anything there that I can improve. Things like bringing your feet within, maybe changing your hand position, improving the angle of your torso, maybe looking at your starting position.

Starting point is 00:29:39 I would start there. And obviously like programming is the biggest factor to look at as well, just how, whether or not you're implementing progressive overload into your training, how hard are you training? Are you going to failure? There's many, many variables that we can look at. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it, in fact,

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Starting point is 00:31:46 you asked a little bit ago. Yeah, let's get into it. Let's just start with one factor you threw out there. Do you train to failure? Do you train to failure? Or do you train to failure often? You do. Yes. So I come from an Olympic weightlifting background. I trained most of my, I guess I did Olympic weightlifting for about four years and it was mainly Bulgarian style lifting. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but that just involves daily maxes is what you call daily maxes. So obviously the amount that you can lift in every session is going to vary based on just your nervous system readiness, how tired you are, how well you recovered from the previous sessions. But ultimately what you're trying to do is lift as much as you can in any one particular session.

Starting point is 00:32:29 Was this started in Venezuela or in the US? It was here. So my Olympic weightlifting coach is Cuban and their training philosophies come from Eastern Europe as well. Is that Camilo? Camilo, yeah. Camilo Garcia. Camilo Garcia. That was kind of my initial introduction into strength training. I kind of like picked up certain things from that and also learned why they might not be the best. Essentially, people in Bulgaria, Russia, the system to find the best athletes is a little bit different than it is here. Basically, you know, they're, they're putting a lot of people through extremely rigorous training and the people that you see succeed are very few. You know, I'm talking about 0.0001% of all the kids that they put through these training programs make it through. So it's like you either thrive under those conditions or you break. But you know, how weak for for BUDS training, Navy SEALs.

Starting point is 00:33:26 Yes. So it works, but it's not the best way. And I don't think that a lot of people are built to withstand that amount of beating. The way that I kind of modified that, combined my experience with, I guess, my academic training, which is I have a background in exercise physiology and I have my doctorate in physical therapy. I've been able to implement a little bit from practical with what the science says. So in terms of training to failure, there's a lot of controversy when it comes to what the minimal effective dose of training is. There's pretty much two separate camps,

Starting point is 00:34:06 one that is all about accumulating volume, just doing very low, not very, but low load, high volume style training in hopes of sparing your body, your tissues and decreasing your injury risk. And then there's the other one that's the Bulgarian Russian that goes all the way to the other extreme, which is if your goal is to get stronger, then you have to train in a way that's conducive to the adaptations that you're trying to elicit. Like if you're trying to get better at your one mile, you're trying to beat your one mile run, you're going to run one mile often. So same principle here. If you're trying to get a better one rep max squat, you gotta be squatting to a daily max or a really high intensity often. And where my training philosophies fall is somewhere down the middle. And it's the same way with pretty much everything in my life. I try not to swing in one particular direction. I try to stay unbiased and I try to kind of learn a little bit from everyone from every camp and then apply it to myself and to the people that

Starting point is 00:35:10 I coach. So as far as the way that I train and coach other people, it's a mix. Could you give us an example of a competition training split for you? And then we can just walk through what some of the workouts look like. So in preparation for a competition, you essentially break down your training into four blocks. You have your general, your GPP, your general physical preparedness phase, where you're essentially just accumulating volume, improving just your aerobic capacity, your ability to do multiple reps. So this is a high volume phase. Then you move into a more specialized block where you start getting rid of all the fluff in your

Starting point is 00:35:53 programs. You start decreasing the amount of cardio you do, the amount of exercise variability, and you start increasing the frequency of the main lifts. So you start squatting, benching, and deadlifting more because those are the three lifts that are tested in competition. Then you go into the intensification phase, which is where you start increasing the intensity. So you start getting into the 85, 90, 95, 100% of the three main lifts and do nothing else other than that. Maybe a little bit of core, a little bit of back, just because you have to start focusing and hyper-specializing more into those three things that you're going to be tested on. Then you go through a two-week deload period where you pretty much cut everything that you've been doing in half by 50%. And then you got your

Starting point is 00:36:39 competition. And it's funny because when you get to your competition, it's like you're the strongest you've ever been after going through that process, but you're also the least human that you've ever been as well. Going up a flight of stairs is excruciatingly tiring. Because you're so specialized at that point. Yeah. You decondition in every other area. You move like you're made out of tinfoil, like you're made out of metal. Seriously, it's awful. I thought you were trying to shit, so there's that.

Starting point is 00:37:16 Oh, yeah. My friend Mark Bell, you may have met before. He's hilarious talking about that, going through his fat and skinny phases and when he's big, having trouble tying his shoes. It's really a high degree of specialization. And then if you look at, let's just take, you could pick any of those phases, but let's just say maybe the intensification phase. What does a week of training look like? How are things spread out? Personally, I like squatting two or three times per week, deadlifting one time per week and benching three to four times per week. So in the intensification phase, you're basically staying within nothing more than five reps. So I tend to, when I'm squatting five reps, so, okay, let's make it easier. So say Monday,

Starting point is 00:38:02 Wednesday, Friday, I'm squatting, I'm doing five reps and three reps, then two reps on those days. And so the reps go down, but the intensity goes up as the week goes by. If I'm following that split, then I'll likely deadlift closer to my least intense squat day. So I'll likely deadlift within the beginning of the week if I'm going to split it that way so that I'm not so tired by the end of the week and can actually see what I'm capable of doing in the deadlift. And then bench, I usually keep it a lot higher volume, even during an intensification phase. I think that especially for women, because we, I don't know what the phenomenon is. I actually want to get into that because I don't have an answer, but something about the bench press and women, we just make progress a lot slower. And I think in terms of absolute strength, we rarely reach it. So we can get away with pretty much anything. We're doing higher volume, lower volume, more sets, more reps,

Starting point is 00:38:56 whatever it is. And it doesn't seem to impact the way that we recover from these sessions. If we're looking at the whole picture, you've mentioned longevity in sport in the context of Ed Cohn competing for some ungodly number of years, 20 years, and how you contend with plateaus or very slow progress, injuries, and certainly he's no stranger to injuries. have a leg buckle under 900 pounds or a thousand pounds. I mean, things don't always, you don't always just jog away from one of those. How has rehab or prehab been included or thought of as a component of your training and your athletic life in general? I'm a little bit adverse to those terms because I think they're oftentimes used out of context and for their wrong purposes, especially by medical professionals, physical therapists, chiropractors. But I think it's, look, rehab, prehab are essentially training. So it falls into periodization. It falls into how are you organizing your training to make sure you're actually going

Starting point is 00:40:06 through the appropriate phases to set you up to be able to withstand so that your tissues essentially can tolerate the amount of load that you're placing on them. This is something that I actually love talking about is why do injuries happen? You know, most people think that they can prevent injuries through stretching or they can prevent injuries through doing rehab or corrective exercises. And that's nothing more than someone trying to position themselves in a way that makes them seem like they know something that you don't. Positioning themselves as if, you know, they're some sort of like, I always say this, the Sherlock Holmes of injuries, like they can pinpoint the exact area of weakness that you have that will lead to an injury. And that type of thinking is overly simplistic and it's outdated. You know, we like to think that we have the answers for everything. And maybe that happens because

Starting point is 00:41:02 humans want to know the exact cause of things. And then maybe healthcare practitioners feel pressured to have to give this very specific and concrete answers when in reality, injuries are multifactorial. And more often than not, identifying the exact source of an injury or why it happened or what tissue is injured is very, very difficult. The best way that I can explain this is injuries, not most times, always happen when the load that you're imparting on tissues exceed their tolerance. So the way I visualize it, it's a two-part equation where you have load on one side, you have tolerance on one side.

Starting point is 00:41:46 So it becomes about managing external forces and building internal tolerance to those forces. So when I talk about load, it's everything I spoke about, how you organize your training, you know, whether you're going through the right phases and you're progressively increasing the amount of weight that you're lifting to allow your tissues to be able to withstand those forces. Then on the same topic of load, say that you start having an area or a tissue that's starting to get irritated. You have to think about how are these forces being dispersed within your body? Maybe the way that you're lifting, say people have SI joint pain. SI joint, that's sacroiliac joint, right? So could you just tell people where that is if

Starting point is 00:42:32 they weren't located on their own bodies? So your sacroiliac joint is pretty much on your hip. So if you were to put your hands on your hip with your thumbs facing backwards, it's essentially where your thumb ends up naturally when you put your hands on your waist. It's a common area that gets hurt when you're lifting weights. But anyway, so what I'm saying is sometimes when that happens, it's also a matter of where are those forces being dispersed within your body and why is that one area taking up most of that load? So a corrective exercise is essentially figuring out what exercises you can do that would spare the irritated tissue. That's what a corrective

Starting point is 00:43:11 exercise is. And then as far as increasing the tolerance, then again, that just goes, you got to reduce workload or modify workload so that your tissues can actually have time to repair from your previous training days and be able to continue repairing, healing, and then doing it all over again. That is the essence of injuries. And anyone that tells you anything more complex or that tries to tell you that your multifidus is irritated or is inflamed or that you're whatever. People just get so caught up on just these details that matter very little when it comes to creating a plan of care for a patient. Let's use a real or hypothetical example, but have you battled with, say, low back injury or

Starting point is 00:43:59 other injuries that we can use as a case study? Yeah. Oh my God. That was my inspiration for writing my book. If you could talk to what you have done following an injury and how it differs from what might be common approaches, I think that'd be very helpful for people. So I'll give you guys a little background on the type of injury I had, and then I'll get into some of the things that I did to get out of it, essentially. I was in my first year of physical therapy school the first time that I had a seemingly career-ending injury. For some reason, you know, we attach so much emotion to a low back injury. I'm assuming it's mostly cultural and societally based. It's just the fear surrounding back injuries that's been perpetuated by healthcare professionals and doctors based on many, many things that I actually talk about in my book. The first time I remember,

Starting point is 00:44:57 it was chronic in nature in the sense that it was just getting increasingly worse every training session. And I guess any high level performer athlete would relate to this in the sense that you, at the beginning, when you start experiencing aches and pains, you try to ignore them, try to convince yourself that it's not as bad as it seems. And you just try to look for ways to continue training. You think it's part of the game. You know, you think that no pain, no gain. These are all things that are so deeply ingrained in our beliefs as athletes that we have a hard time taking a step back because we're afraid of exposing our weaknesses or we're afraid of quitting or we're

Starting point is 00:45:36 afraid of our coach thinking that we don't want it enough. And so we just tend to ignore the signals that our body is sending us. So that's exactly what I did. And what's funny is that even, you know, I had a pretty solid understanding about the human body and injuries and how this all works, and even then I was just so, it wasn't such denial of what I was experiencing, that I just essentially kept increasing the amount of painkillers

Starting point is 00:46:02 that I was taking and didn't change anything else. Kept showing up to training, kept training as hard as I was before. Just started maybe tying my belt a little bit tighter, wearing my belt a little bit sooner. And like I said, increasing the amount of painkillers I was taking. And it was a recipe for disaster. I spent several months training in excruciating pain to the point where it started affecting my activities of daily living. You know, I was having a hard time putting my socks on or putting my shoes on. Remember waking up in the morning, just so stiff.

Starting point is 00:46:37 Like I looked like I was 120 years old. I could barely move. I needed to have assistance doing many things. And what's crazy is that I still thought that it was normal. I'm like, I'm a power lifter. I'm expected to feel this way. And that just led to this one lift. One time, I remember I unracked the bar. I was going for a three rep max personal best. And I unrack the bar. I felt kind of more wobbly than normal in my low back. I lowered the bar down and at the bottom of the lift, I just felt kind of like a, like a snap on my back or kind of, yeah, just something really wrong. So I tossed the bar onto the pins, fell down onto the floor and laid there for 45

Starting point is 00:47:26 minutes without being able to move, without being able to take my belt off, nothing, just completely just paralyzed by pain. And obviously, you know, at that point was, I actually know you would think that I would take a step back then I actually took, I think I took a week off and then went to, uh, to San Diego to compete in the biggest powerlifting competition of the year. I actually called stubborn. I know I called Ed when that happened. And I called Mark Bell called both of them. And I asked him what they would do. And I asked him if, if they've competed injured and they both said yes. So I was like, man, you know, if, if they can do it, I can do it. Like there's, I'm a week out of a competition. Yeah. I got really hurt, but

Starting point is 00:48:09 whatever, you know, I'll just, I'll suck it up and then I'll, and I'll rest afterwards kind of thing. So I did it. I competed. It was the worst competition of my life. I bombed out in an international stage. It was pretty embarrassing. Bombed out means you didn't, you didn't make your attempts. Exactly. And that was, that was my wake up call that that was the moment when I was like, okay, like I, I actually have to do something. I have to do something to, to fix this or to, to get out of pain. And that's when my quest for figuring out low back injuries came in. I had obviously had access to a lot of seemingly great physical

Starting point is 00:48:46 therapists, given that I was in a top 10 nationwide program for physical therapy. And I was able to ask for different opinions from a lot of people. And what was surprising to me was that I was constantly getting different answers. They didn't seem to have really anything in common. And it was just so evident to me that no one really knew what they were talking about. Really? Like I would just get a different diagnosis every time I would go to talk to a different person. I got no consistency in terms of their responses. So imagine that, right? Like I'm the patient in this case, and I'm going to what I would consider kind of the most powerful figures of authority that I had access to, professors that

Starting point is 00:49:31 I look up to, professors that are PhDs that are doing research, maybe some that were biomechanics, some that are spine specialists. And still, I was not getting, one, I wasn't getting any relief, and two, I wasn't, again, I wasn't getting any relief. And two, I wasn't, again, I wasn't getting any consistency in their answers. So that's when I started reading a ton about it and obsessing about it to the point where I thought I should write a book to help clear up some of the confusion that not only clinicians are experiencing, but obviously patients. And I think part of that problem lies in, I'm lucky in the sense that I practice physical therapy in the non-traditional sense, because I don't see patients. I spend most of my time

Starting point is 00:50:12 reading research, which again is one part of evidence-based practice. I guess I practice on myself and on people that are around me. Most clinicians between patients and paperwork and all the things that they have to do in a day, they don't really have time to dive into the research like I did. This book took two years to write and we pretty much go back 5,000 years to understand where our beliefs come from and how science has evolved and how pain science has impacted some of the recommendations and how it's changed over the years so that hopefully we can have a more unified approach when it comes to back rehab, essentially. Well, I have a million questions and I want to make sure we offer some specifics to folks who may want to get some tactical advice, realizing that you don't see

Starting point is 00:51:08 patients. But I want to take this in a few different directions. So the first is your experience with this injury, paralytic on the ground in pain. you compete, bomb out. Certainly, I would say, didn't do yourself any favors with the back by doing that. What were some of the things, insights or training approaches that ended up really making a difference for you? Especially with the lack of diagnosis, because I think a lot of people listening, or lack of consensus in diagnosis, right? So I'm looking at some notes from your book, which I don't think are verbatim, but they're really important, I think, just to underscore for folks. So there's one paragraph that really jumped out at me, and I'm just going to read this here. Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. In other words,

Starting point is 00:52:02 the Osler maxim, 3,000 years into an effort to unlock the mystery of pain continues to produce more noise and signal. There's still no discernible cause for back pain in 95% to 99% of cases, yet it continues to be the leading cause of disability worldwide. So this is a very depressing paragraph for a lot of people, but I want to break it into two pieces. Number one is that when people say science proves or studies show, you should always look at the source material because science, or I should say more accurately, really good research and studies, really just indicate the probability of something being true. And so you have to really understand that you cannot say definitively, or you should be very cautious of saying definitively, this proves this. You have an inflamed sartorius muscle, and that's referring to your left shoulder, which is causing your right

Starting point is 00:52:53 testicle to swell, which is causing your right eye to hurt, right? But you hear that kind of shit all the time, and it's like, wow, okay. I had no idea that that cascade was so powerful. And there are good PTs and very good doctors out there, but you should be aware of complicating to profit, right? Or if a medical professional is aware that you are shopping for a certain diagnosis, eventually you will find someone who is willing to give you the diagnosis

Starting point is 00:53:18 that you think you have. So you have to be very cautious. But breaking it into this, so that's just overview comment on the limitations of what people consider science. But breaking it into this, so that's just overview comment on the limitations of what people consider science. Even when it comes to scientific research, there's actually studies, and I don't have the name of it here, but there's actually studies that prove that more often than not, the results of a study

Starting point is 00:53:37 are likely incorrect or non-generalizable. Yeah, it's the replication crisis. It's the ability to replicate studies and the outcomes of studies is abysmally difficult. Exactly, exactly. That's a whole separate thing. It's such a bummer. We need more money in funding replication studies, but there's so little career and status incentive for academics to focus their own personal resources on replication that we end up in this really gnarly situation. But let's jump to the second part, which is more personalized for a lot of people listening. That is, there's no discernible cause for back pain in 95 to 99% of cases. So a lot of people listening to what you said and hearing that will say, well, fuck,

Starting point is 00:54:21 if you can't figure out what's causing it, how can you possibly fix it? So then let's use that as a leaping point to what did you do that helped? What are the things that you ended up finding really had a valuable bang for the buck? So let's go back just briefly on our terminology, the words that we were using. So when you say, let's do it, what can we do to fix it? I don't like when people say that because that implies that something's broken. Yeah, no. Whip my ass into shape. I want you to tell me better words to use because the words, the limits of our words are the limits of our world, right? So strike that from the record.

Starting point is 00:55:01 Yeah. I would just say, how can we decrease your symptoms or how can we decrease your discomfort? There's nothing to fix, especially when it comes to, like I said, 95% of those cases, you know, we're moving further away from the mechanistic views of the sources of back pain. So all this means is we come from a background where when it comes to the neurophysiology of pain, we used to tie the severity of a symptom to the amount of damage in our body. And with the evolution of pain science, especially now that it's kind of permeating more into the physical therapy realm and fitness and sports, now we understand that pain isn't directly tied to tissue damage. So we essentially, we're overly relying on diagnostic tests like the

Starting point is 00:55:53 MRI or the x-rays because it's essentially, it gives you a really good picture of what's inside, but it completely takes out of the equation, the subjectivity of pain. So we know just based on research that, or based on studies that 37% of 20 year olds have asymptomatic degenerative disc disease and disc herniations. Those numbers bump all the way up to 84 and 94% for people over 80 years old. So it's just that what you see on the inside is a better way to look at it is as just wrinkles on the inside, things that happen naturally from aging. And we need to stop to detach the emotions that we have with, I guess, those images, because they don't really tell you much about what the person is experiencing. That was another line from the notes on your book that I highlighted, which is pain isn't

Starting point is 00:56:48 a reliable sign of damage. Exactly. Which is very counterintuitive, right? Because you cut your finger when you're cutting carrots with a knife and you're like, cut, hurt, pain, cause, effect, and end of story, right? But it's just not that simple. No, of course. And like I said, look, there's two views. There's a mechanistic and then

Starting point is 00:57:08 there's the pain science. So again, I fall somewhere in the middle. I would never say that there's no way that nothing's going on underneath your skin. I'm sure that there's some cases where there's an actual structure that's getting irritated that somehow got hurt. And that is the source of pain. But in 95% of cases, we really don't know what the source is. And I don't think that should be discouraging. I think that should be encouraging because now you can relate your pain experience to most cases. It's always good when you fall within the lines of the probability and not when you're outside. That's when you're in trouble because you're a special case. You don't want to be a special case. Well, you're right. You said you're in the middle. You're like the Goldilocks of power

Starting point is 00:57:51 lifting and pain science. You're always in the middle. So let's get into some specifics. I think this is super fascinating. So we're not going to use fix. We're going to talk about decreasing symptoms of pain, right? I think what you also said is that like, hey, if you're within one standard deviation of the middle, that's actually really good news. If you're in the group that is 90 to 99% of cases having no discernible cause, that's actually not necessarily a bad thing. If you're like three, five sigma out and you're missing 10 vertebra, then you really have a major issue going on. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:58:26 Let's talk about some of the actions you took or things you stopped that made a real difference for you. In terms of, this is something, an assessment. It's something that you can do on your own is instead of focusing on what needs fixing or what is the failing structure, you can focus on things that are a lot more actionable in your assessment or your therapist or whoever is doing it for you or yourself. And the things that I look at are first directional preference. So essentially what that means is are you flexion or extension intolerant?

Starting point is 00:59:02 So does it hurt when you bend forward or does it hurt when you bend backwards? That's the first thing that you need to figure out and you'll know. And this is for overall back pain or lower back pain. What type of pain are we talking about? Like how does it present? This is more specific to low back pain, but it, it, it directional preference. It would literally apply to any injury. Does it hurt when you bend your knee or when you extend your knee? Does it hurt when you rotate your neck to the right or when you rotate your neck to the left? So it's just kind of like you're checking in with yourself to see what are the positions that increase your symptoms and what are the positions that

Starting point is 00:59:35 decrease your symptoms? That's essentially all that it is. Then within direction, there's also compression versus sheer, especially when it comes to the low back. So compression, you can do an easy test just by sitting on a chair and you put your hands underneath the chair and you push yourself, your buttocks towards the chair, creating compression. So are you intolerant to compression or is it more sheer? So bending forward, say with a light object on your hands farther away from your body? Does that increase your pain more? So just checking in with yourself to gain more understanding about the things that improve your pain or decrease your pain. Then what are some of the postures that increase the painful sensations?

Starting point is 01:00:17 Is it sitting down? Is it standing up? Is it walking a lot? Is it not walking a lot? Is it running? Is it lifting? Is it, you know, what are you doing in doing in the day to day that exacerbates your symptoms? And finally figuring out what your current load tolerance is, especially if you're a lifter, I guess this doesn't apply if you're

Starting point is 01:00:33 not a lifter, but if you are a lifter, you have to figure out what your margin of error is when it comes to your injury. You know, when are, when do your symptoms start appearing? Is it at 50%? Is it at 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%? When do they start appearing? And during the time where your symptoms seem to be heightened, then that's a good time for you to stay underneath that margin of error and stay underneath that pain threshold. So you can essentially teach your body how to get out of pain. Do you have an opinion of, as another point of reference, Healing Back Pain, The Mind-Body Connection by John Sarno. Do you have any opinion of, that book comes up a lot in conversations about back pain. Do you have any commentary? I actually haven't read it. I'll have to get

Starting point is 01:01:23 back to you on that. Okay, no problem. a TBD. I just want to add sort of a small bit of commentary about pain, because I, like a lot of people, was very mechanistic for the majority of my life. Something hurts, something must be broken or torn or strained. Let me find that problem and fix that problem and pain will disappear. And I had chronic, chronic, severe pain in my left mid back for many years. And I think it was initially caused by, you know, an acute incident, specifically a closet fell off a moving truck and I caught the closet, which was like, I don't know, a hundred plus pounds, really large. And it twisted my torso to one side. It was a bad, bad injury. But that pain then recurred for many, many years. And I didn't experiment with,

Starting point is 01:02:17 and I'm not advising this to people listening, but so that I could speak to the experience intelligently from firsthand experience, did a series of five ketamine infusions intravenously at one point. And the intention was not at all to look at chronic pain, but it is used for, in some cases, chronic pain. That didn't mean anything to me at the time because I hadn't done the reading. And I came away from my experience past that week, overall not feeling like I could recommend ketamine therapy outside of someone with acute suicidal ideation, where I think it does have real applications. But about a week later, I realized that my mid-back pain had completely vanished and it did not come back. This is like a year and a half now and counting. And it just, there are theories around ketamine's effects

Starting point is 01:03:09 on NMDA receptors and so on that account for this, but it's thought to almost provide like a hard reset for some of these pain pathways. And again, I'm using terminology that perhaps I shouldn't, but like that you can in some way paste over these ruts that have been created in terms of repetitive circuits that cause these experiences subjectively of pain. But the idea that I could have an infusion a couple of days and then walk away and have this pain just vanish, even though it is in the short term an anesthetic, was so mind-blowing to me that there would be durability to that effect. So it's caused me to think about pain completely differently. Yeah, that is super interesting. I actually would love to read more about ketamine specifically for persistent pain, but it just goes to show just

Starting point is 01:03:56 how powerful our brains are, right? Like if you're experiencing persistent pain, our bodies adapt to literally anything. So it would make no sense that you have something broken or something that needs fixing for, for two plus years, even for more than six months, it's already a stretch. So it just goes to show how, and you know, in your case was the ketamine infusion, but anything that breaks the pain cycle is positive in terms of delivering a more positive response to pain. Because essentially you start forming these habits that are tied to your experience with pain. It's not more of a sensation anymore.

Starting point is 01:04:34 It's about the perception we have and the experiences that we have that literally alter the way that we feel and think and sense threat from the environment. So we were talking about your assessment, the general parameters for doing an assessment. And I'm sitting here with a couple of injuries right now thinking about this, my wrist and my left hip and all this. I ate an orange and went to bed and woke up with a neck injury kind of thing. I don't know what the hell's going on. But the point is, you know, ate an orange and went to bed and woke up with like a neck injury kind of thing. I don't know what the hell's going on. But the point is, we're talking about an assessment after an injury.

Starting point is 01:05:14 For people who are thinking to themselves, you know, I would like to make an investment in making my body more resilient so that the likelihood of having a back injury is lower. Are there any recommendations that you would have for those people? Any often neglected types of strengthening or anything really that come to mind? I mean, according to the literature, it's not so much strengthening. It's not either a stability thing. That's another hole that we can get into. But I mean, the best way, I guess, to prevent any injury, back injuries is endurance. So there's a bunch of studies done on construction workers and other form of labor workers. And they determined essentially that the ones with the most back endurance, and they measured this via doing hold back extensions. So how long can you hold a back

Starting point is 01:06:03 extension? So it's not necessarily for strength, but more so how long can you hold a certain posture? For duration, yeah. For duration, yeah. So they determined that those with the most back endurance were the most resilient to back injuries. And then it goes back to positions, postures, and movements that you practice. So a lot of people, for example, when people want to get into running, running is accessible to everyone, right? You just put a pair of sneakers on and you go out and run. The thing that happens with that is that you didn't appropriately expose yourself to the mileage that you were going to do or the terrain. And so making sure that there's an appropriate, again, an appropriate progression in what you're doing and you're practicing those specific

Starting point is 01:06:50 movements, those are going to be the movements that are safe for you. So there's also research studies done where you change the way that people lift things. So again, this was, I think it was construction workers again, where have you seen how they lift? Like they have like their back rounded and they're picking up super heavy stuff and their form quote unquote looks bad because we have this idea of what good form is versus what bad form is. That is totally arbitrary based on, I don't know what, who said, they say, people love to say, they say that's bad form. I don't know who they is, but essentially, you know, these people have trained those positions, those postures, those movements that way for their entire life. Therefore, those are the positions that they are the strongest in. So when it comes to modifying the way that you lift or the way that

Starting point is 01:07:40 you pick up things or the way that you pick up your baby or the way you don't need to move like anyone else. You need to move like yourself. Whatever you've been doing for a long time that hasn't given you problems, then that's the way that you should continue moving. Yeah. Just a quick side note on the form and the they, the Illuminati of the internet, who are like, that's bad form them. I remember, and again, I'm talking out my ass because I'm such a junior varsity tourist when it comes to any type of strength training, but I'm a fan of strength training. I try not to have too strong an opinion about anything because I'm not qualified, but I remember the first time I saw, and I may be

Starting point is 01:08:22 pronouncing his name incorrectly, but Konstantin's Konstantinov's. Yes. Deadlifting raw with a rounded back setup. How crazy. Right? And he has a rounded back setup. For anybody, everybody should look this guy up. He is fucking, I mean, he's a superhero.

Starting point is 01:08:40 No belt either. It's unbelievable. No belt. No belt. No belt. And he's just a complete beast. And I don't know how much he can deadlift. It's just like 420 plus kilos, which is raw without a belt. But he sets up and he rounds his back. And so you see that and you see him clearly as this master technician of the

Starting point is 01:09:04 deadlift. and there are all these millions of variations that he also uses in training, and you're like, okay, who's going to tell this guy that he's lifting incorrectly? No. Yeah. Yeah, because we have this obsession with not rounding when we bend forward. Again, one of those beliefs that have been perpetuated over the years coming from probably someone interpreting a research paper incorrectly. That is a very advanced deadlifting technique that he developed. He skillfully developed throughout the years in order to make that position his strongest

Starting point is 01:09:36 position and the least likely position for him to get hurt. Now, the obsession of like keeping your back straight when you deadlift is kind of silly because even when you can't observe that there's rounding in the lower back, your spinal segments are at about 60% to 70% inflection, even when you're not seeing any flexion happening. When your back is in quote unquote neutral, your back is bent. Your spinal segments are already, they've changed in the angles that they're in. They're already flexing. So there's nothing necessarily inherently wrong with that. There's no instability going on because essentially what is stability? That's funny. That is what got me into this whole topic. People talking about low back stability,

Starting point is 01:10:22 you got to improve stability, stability, stability of the segments. That was something that was so hammered in our brains in physical therapy school that I had to go back and see what the whole, what the fuzz was about when it came to that. But essentially we need to understand the differences in concepts between stability and robustness when it comes to back pain so that we can understand essentially what their recommendations would be. In terms of definitions, robustness, and I like to bring the analogy of comparing an oak tree to a willow tree. So in terms of robustness is your ability to cope with disturbances in your environment. So an oak tree will be a lot more robust than a willow tree when wind blows onto it versus stability is just the ability of a system to

Starting point is 01:11:07 return to normal after a disturbance. So the notion that back pain or people who get hurt, dead lifting or doing anything lacks stability is unfounded because as biological beings, we have the capability to either up-regulate or down-regulate the amount of tension that is in our muscles at any given time in proportion to the task that we are doing. So the amount of stability that you need to lay on your couch is different than the amount of stability that you need when you're lifting something up. Not to mention it's difficult to measure. Like no one knows how much stability you need or anything like that. So we are capable of strengthening and stabilizing any position as long as it's the position that we're training, if that makes sense.

Starting point is 01:12:02 Yeah, that makes sense. Let me ask a question I think you're going to hate, if you don't mind. Go ahead. You're going to be like, oh, this fucking guy. All right. So I recall this must have been around 2008, 2009. I was probably, for the sake of simplicity, say the fittest and certainly the strongest that I've been in the last 10 years or so. And I felt very resilient, very robust in terms of injury prevention. I just did not get injured a lot despite doing a lot of training. At the time, and it's so difficult, maybe impossible to say or identify single causes and effects. But nonetheless, I had, at the time, I had quite a bit of interaction with Gray Cook, who has the functional movement screen and so on. And I was using Turkish Get Up, Single Leg Deadlift, and Chop and Lift quite a bit. And so he uses the Turkish Get Up as a diagnostic tool. He also uses

Starting point is 01:13:02 it as a corrective tool. Maybe that's the right way to phrase it. But I found that I found these exercises to be extremely helpful for kind of checking a lot of boxes at once and in terms of like time invested and benefits. Are there any exercises or types of training that you would put in that bucket for yourself? I think part of the reason why you experienced a positive, why you had a positive experience with those movements by implementing them into your existing training has to do with movement variability. So what happens when we look at people who are hurt, one of the things that jumps out the most is the lack of movement options that

Starting point is 01:13:46 they have, lack of movement variability. So the more hurt that you are, the less movement options you have. So essentially you're expanding your movement vocabulary by incorporating movements that challenge you in different planes. You know, your ability to resist forces that are coming different ways, you ways, by holding a kettlebell in the overhead position, the chop that's working on the transverse plane, you're working on your rotators, your spinal stabilizers. So I think the reason why that worked for you was essentially because you increased your movement vocabulary and you were giving your body more options for movement where it felt non-threatened and it felt safe.

Starting point is 01:14:27 So almost any movement has the capability to do that. And that's why I emphasize the importance of having a GPP, a general physical preparedness face to any program. And that's something that really gets lost in over-specialized sports like powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting is that people think they have to be doing squat, bench, and deadlift all the time and don't find time or ignore the fact that they have to include other movements in order to maintain their longevity and in order to kind of boost their own tissue tolerance and their ability to remain injury-free. Well, it's true outside of powerlifting too, right? I mean, if you take someone who has any

Starting point is 01:15:10 type of repetitive movement, it could be tennis. If you're just a recreational tennis player and sort of amateur, which almost everyone is going to be, and you're like hitting in a very comfortable plane of motion with your forehand and backhand, and then you're limiting your exercise to that, and then one day you have this heated scrimmage with a friend, and you get thrown out of that normal plane of motion. If you're not supplementing that with additional colors on the palate in the form of some type of general physical preparedness, then there's a decent chance you're going to get injured.

Starting point is 01:15:44 Beautiful. Right? Exactly. And I say that with confidence because that's, I think, what just happened to me. But then that goes to show that no one, you know, that there's no magic exercise. You know, I love talking about the McGill Big Three. So for anyone who doesn't know, Stuart McGill is one of the most well-known authors when it comes to low back pain and research. And a lot of people kind of put this three exercises on a

Starting point is 01:16:12 pedestal and view him as this guru because somehow the bird dog, the dead bug, and the side plank became the best way to cure all back pain. But, and I'm saying- Wait, hold on one second. So the bird dog, I know, people can look it up. We're not going to get into it. Side plank, I know. What is the dead bug?

Starting point is 01:16:37 Sounds like something I'd be really good at. So literally, I mean, how you would encounter a dead bug when they're on their back and they're like flailing their arms in the air. That's what doing a dead bug looks like. You just like stick your arms and legs straight up in the air while you're on your back? Yeah. And so you alternate, you know, right arm back, left leg out, and then alternate back and forth. Ah, okay. Okay. Yeah. And that's the thing, right?

Starting point is 01:17:06 I always like to understand why. So when I first learned about those movements, I'm like, okay, I mean, these provide me with relief. But why? Is it because these are some magical movements or, you know, what is going on here? And I think the assumption a lot of people make is that that improves core stability because they assume that that's the missing link. And again, that's dangerous because it goes back to perpetuating that fear that people have about their spines and it leads to people being extremely overprotective in their strategy. So what actually happens with these three exercises, the dead bug, the bird dog, and the side plank is that the reason why they decrease pain symptoms

Starting point is 01:17:51 is twofold. The first thing is you're essentially providing a positive movement experience. Again, if you're having acute bout of back pain, or if, or if you've been in pain for a while, it's about finding a position that doesn't increase your pain symptoms. And the other one is a very well-documented phenomenon called exercise-induced analgesia, which is basically, you know, when you're contracting a muscle isometrically, there's muscle spindles and chemoreceptors within your muscle that send signals to the brain to downregulate the pain signal. So it provides you with a temporary reduction in pain symptoms.

Starting point is 01:18:28 So it's not that they're magical. It's just that they work based on these two mechanisms, not because they're improving stability, not because you're unstable and now you're stable, not because it's magical, but because of these reasons. So same with those three movements that you were doing by Gray Cook. Yeah. Any really good doctor I respect in the large group of doctors I've met, most of which I think are way over their skis in terms of confidence, the best doctors and

Starting point is 01:19:00 the best scientists also will say something along the lines of 50% of what we know is wrong, we just don't know which 50%, right? And that's especially true when trying to identify mechanisms, right? Most of the things, including many pharmaceuticals, work not because we understand how they work, but despite the fact that we don't really know how they work. I think that's also true with a lot of these exercises in terms of the effects that they seem to impart. Let me ask you a totally different question, and this is about visualization or motor imagery. Okay. So I read in a muscle and fitness piece your description of visualization. A lot of people

Starting point is 01:19:43 will have heard this term before, right? But let me just read this paragraph because I want to zoom in on the second part of this. And feel free to fact check this if it isn't accurate, but here's what it says. I'm pretty sure this is attributed to you. Visualization or what's called motor imagery is crucial. So when you're under the bar, you know exactly what to do. The more detail you go into, the better. Walking or driving to the gym, putting your shoes on, the sounds, putting chalk on your hands, grabbing the bar, the smell of the iron, the feeling in your hands, and the successful execution of the lift in detail.

Starting point is 01:20:13 Now, this will sound familiar to a lot of folks, right? If they've ever watched the aerial skiers, the acrobats in the Winter Olympics preparing before a run or divers or really any high-level athlete, they will recognize visualization of that type on some level. Then we continue to the second part of the quote from you, which is the second part, which I believe to be even more important, is visualizing a negative outcome. We don't want to plan for it, but we need to prepare for it so we know how to react. Can you keep it together and try again, or will you crumble under pressure? I've never read anything like this before. Could you please elaborate and give an example of that second part, visualizing a negative outcome and how you use that? Yeah, absolutely. You know,

Starting point is 01:20:57 I think part of the way that we react to certain situations is related to how prepared we are for that situation. And when it comes to negative outcomes, you know, especially as athletes, we're told to always keep a positive attitude. We're always taught to think positively, to not think about anything going wrong. And I think that does a disservice because things are going to go wrong

Starting point is 01:21:21 at one point or the other. It doesn't matter what your winning streak is, whether you're a boxer, an MMA fighter, a power lifter, there's going to be a point where it's not going to go your way. And how you react to that is dependent on how prepared you were to deal with that situation. So I actually started working with a sports psychologist after I bombed out of that meet that we were talking about about because you start doubting yourself. You start doubting your ability to make lifts on a platform. Pressure starts setting in. You have all these expectations by other people, by yourself. And it really terrified me to go back on the platform after that happened. I was embarrassed, was really embarrassed. And instead of avoiding those thoughts, you know, the thought of things going wrong was what was in my mind every single day after that. Well, what if that happens to me again? And then I asked myself the question, well, what if that happens to me again? Like, how am I going to respond? Like, I should probably

Starting point is 01:22:20 have a plan of, you know, what I'm going to do if that ever happens again. So I started visualizing, like I said, negative outcomes. So I go through the same beginning of the visual imagery, starting from putting my singlet on, putting my shoes on. They call my name. The bar is loaded. Go onto the platform. I say it's a squat.

Starting point is 01:22:43 I squat and I miss. Okay, what am I going to do? And I just played with different scenarios of how I was going to react to a situation like that. And what's interesting is that- What would be some examples of how you might respond that you would visualize? So how I've responded in the past was I've cried hysterically, terrified that I wasn't going to make my next attempt. I've been really angry. Assign the blame to someone else. Oh, it's my coach's fault for picking the wrong weight or it's the judge's fault.

Starting point is 01:23:12 It was actually a good lift. It's their fault for not seeing it. They don't like me. The person who wrapped my knees, they don't know what they're doing. My left part of my knee was hurting me. I would have just assigned a blame to something external to someone else and subsequently just have, you know, be upset or sad or angry or whatever it might be. And so when you're visualizing these negative outcomes, are you visualizing those responses or different responses?

Starting point is 01:23:37 So I would practice, I would practice going through different scenarios. And, and when I arrived at one that I thought would be the best course of action, and that's what I stick to. And what's interesting is that the next time I competed was the same competition, just the following year. And I got up there, I was more prepared than I had ever been. I had been doing sports psychology for an entire year. I took time off after my injury, I was feeling strong. I was making a ton of progress, feeling confident. And I got up to a platform and I missed my first squat attempt, which is something that I could have done that I had done in training for five reps. So it's relatively light. Like something that you can do for five reps is like you're 80, 85%. And I missed it on depth. So the judges from the side didn't think that

Starting point is 01:24:28 my hip crease was below my knee. That's how they determined depth. And they gave me red lights. You know, previously I would have reacted to that very upset. I would have, you know, blamed them for not seeing the right thing or whatever. And I mean, I just totally brushed it off. Like I was, I felt like I had been there a million times and you know, when my, my fiance was there, he's like all worried about how I'm going to react because in previous situations I would have been very upset and it would have thrown me completely off my game. Uh, and instead I just kind of laughed it off and it was like, I've been here before. I know exactly what to do. Don't worry. What had you rehearsed for that situation that you landed on as your choice?

Starting point is 01:25:11 Exactly. That I knew what to do, that I trusted my capabilities, that I was prepared, that I had trained really well, that I was feeling strong. I just kept repeating that to myself, that it was just a fluke, that I'm going to go back up there and I'm going to crush the second attempt. What's funny is I went up for the second attempt and got red lighted again. So at that time, I mean, I was pretty much reliving my experience from the previous year that US Open. And you get three shots, is that right? Three shots. Yeah. But same thing. I was totally calm, collected. I just didn't, again, I didn't, um, my perception of that failure was completely different. I just thought of it as part of the game as something that happens. That doesn't mean anything about my strength levels. It doesn't mean anything about my

Starting point is 01:25:59 abilities as an athlete, but what does determine what my abilities as an athlete are, are how can I respond to unfortunate situations during training? How, how fast can I pivot, right? How fast can I adapt to the competition standards? You know, because judges are different every time bars are different platforms are different. So the better athlete is the one that can adjust to those changes in competition standards the fastest. And so that's what I did. So you left us with a cliffhanger. So you got red lights for two attempts.

Starting point is 01:26:33 What happened for your third attempt on the squat? And what happened for the lift or excuse me, for the meet? Yeah. So I actually ended up going up in weight, even though I had missed my first two attempts, just because I was that sure that I could do it. I knew it. I'd been there before in my mind. So I went up in weight and I ended up making it. Were there any other particular tools or benefits, maybe tools that you brought with you after doing a year or roughly working a year with sports psychologist?

Starting point is 01:27:06 We worked a lot on, especially being someone that's so open on social media. I felt like a lot of the pressure that I was feeling was imparted on me by just externally, but it's, it's made up in my mind, right? It's like, I felt like everyone was expecting something from me. So I guess it was just circling back at what my why is. Why am I doing what I'm doing? What am I trying to prove? Is it for myself? Is it for other people?

Starting point is 01:27:32 And just always trying to circle back and remember why I started this journey and what does it mean to me? Yeah. And another thing I guess was working on staying positive when you encounter bad training days. Cause you know, a lot of people see your Instagram or your, years where we are completely unmotivated and we don't want to do a certain thing. So working on how to stay positive when things don't go your way, when training sucks, when you don't make progress, when you fail reps every session, when you feel like absolute crap, when 50% feels like 110%, how do you stay positive? And how do you, how are you able to show up to the gym the next day without, you know, without bringing that baggage from the

Starting point is 01:28:32 previous session, uh, onto your, to your next session. And a story that really resonated with me was, and I forgot where I read this, what book it was, but it was about a professional golfer that he would literally not admit to himself or the media or anyone that he had lost a game. He would just totally erase that fact from his memory and just continue on as if nothing happened. And I started doing that. And honestly, my training started going so much better once I was able to let go of my disappointment on a particular session. And once I stopped generalizing a bad outcome in a session to my entire block,

Starting point is 01:29:15 or I stopped thinking, overly thinking about what that meant in terms of who I am as an athlete or as a person. You mentioned books, so I'm going to grab that. Are there any particular books that you've gifted the most to other people or recommended? The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Yeah, yeah. He's my neighbor. He's about 40 minutes from where I'm sitting right now. I love that book so much, man. Yeah, it's excellent. Any others that come to mind? Yeah, then I have With Winning in Mind. I've pretty much gifted that one to any high level athlete that I've been able to befriend.

Starting point is 01:29:53 So I think it's just such a powerful lesson. I read it a long time ago, but it's a really amazing read. And then Extreme Ownership by Jocko. Jocko Willink in Extreme Ownership. If we go back to the second one, just because I didn't recognize it, what was the second title again? With Winning in Mind by Carol Dweck, I believe. Or no, no, it's not Carol Dweck. Don't quote me. Like I said, I don't memorize things. So With Winning in Mind, the mental management system, Lanny Basham. Lanny Basham.

Starting point is 01:30:25 Lanny Basham. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. What do you like about that book? Carol Dweck is the one from Mindset. Yeah. It's Mindset.

Starting point is 01:30:34 The premise of the whole story is about how you manage your mind within your training, within your journey to stay positive and to continue doing what you love doing despite obstacles. That's the premise of the book. I wouldn't be able to tell you details, but it really changed the way that I approached my training and the way I perceived ups and downs. Cool. Yeah, I'm looking at it here. It's short. It's about 162 pages. And I'll give a brief description for folks. In the Olympic sport that is most dependent upon effective and precise mental management, in parentheses, rifle shooting, Olympic gold medalist Lanny Bassham, B-A-S-S-H-A-M, proved he was the master. And then it goes on and on. That sounds like one to pick up. And it's short, so most people will read it.

Starting point is 01:31:28 Now, you said you don't memorize stuff, and yet you have a doctorate in physical therapy. And now that, which, you know, on one hand, I think is, you believe to have been a great investment of time, but my understanding is that you did not take the licensing exam. You didn't do what was expected of you afterwards. So why did you do it? Why did you go through it?

Starting point is 01:31:51 And how did you do it without memorizing? You must have memorized a hell of a lot. And I forgot it immediately after. My brain is just wired a little bit different, man. It really is. I'm a lot better at critical thinking. I'm a lot better at just understanding a concept as a whole and then giving it my own twist and applying it to real life situations. So when it comes to hardcore memorization, for example, memorizing exact ranges of motion of each joint or developmental stages in children, I'm not good at that. I couldn't tell you a single thing about any of that. Makes me think of, this could be an apocryphal story about Henry Ford, I think it was. And

Starting point is 01:32:29 someone asked him if he knew the vice president of blah, blah, blah, or something like that. And he couldn't name the person. And this other guest who had made fun of him was getting up on his high horse. And Ford was like, that's why I have have a library so i don't have to clutter my head with those those details yeah so why did why did you why did you pursue your dbt so initially you know i come from a family that values uh high level education a lot you know a family of like lawyers and doctors and i think that from a family that values high level education a lot, you know, a family of like lawyers and doctors. And I think that from a very early age, I guess I started associating the word success with a high degree, like a high level of education, either going to medical school or at least at the very least getting a doctorate or a master's or something like that.

Starting point is 01:33:22 So part of it, I think, was just pressure from my family initially. And I guess personally, it's something that I also value, like the prestige of being able to say that you're a graduate from a top school and that you were able to complete a program that only, you know, 1% or less of the population gets into that to me was all sounded amazing. And I love a challenge. So that was part of the reason. And the next part was anything that I get into, I want to make sure that I'm giving it, you know, my, my best effort. So if being in fitness, if being in strength and conditioning was my goal, if I wanted to be a trainer or whatever it was, the highest kind of degree or highest level of learning that I could do was,

Starting point is 01:34:09 was a doctorate level degree. Physical therapy seemed like it would give me the tools to be the best trainer, the best coach, the best athlete that I could be. So that was part of the reason. Now, when I was in my first year of grad school, I started my own business. But hold on, before I go there. So first year of grad school, I had already gone through one of my clinical rotations. And honestly, like I just was having such a, I had a, not a great experience in grad school, mainly because of how, mainly because of the system, right? Like I felt like, or not, I felt I knew because I was able to prove it that most of the information that was being thrown at us was extremely outdated

Starting point is 01:34:52 and pretty much the purpose of all of it was one to test, to test your, your commitment to the profession, like to test how bad you wanted it. You know, you're taking, I don't know, something ridiculous, like six to eight classes a semester. And there's just so much information that I didn't find applicable at all. And it was just so outdated and professors were so resistant to challenges. You know, I'd be that person sitting in the back row, raising my hand and challenging, you know, something that the professors said factually or with a lot of confidence. And they wouldn't like that. They don't like when they're being questioned. They don't like when there's a student that doesn't believe what they're saying and, and asks things that they don't know how to answer. So there was a lot of, a lot of resistance there in school with my professors.

Starting point is 01:35:45 And then when it came to practice, when I went on to my first clinical rotation and was inexperienced a little bit of what the general field of physical therapy is like, it just wasn't what I thought it was going to be. When you're in a big clinic, you're expected to see at least two patients at a time. I didn't feel like patients were receiving the best service or the best care at all because you're so all over the place having to do your notes and all of this. And I remember this one experience I had with my first evaluation that I ever did. I was in the room, my patient, and I do everything by the book, right? So you have this steps, A, B, C, D, E steps that you have to do when you're taking a history

Starting point is 01:36:25 and you're doing your exam, you're doing your evaluation, you're doing your follow-up questions, then you're doing your special tests, and then you give a diagnosis. So I went through all of it perfectly, did my special tests and got something that made no sense. You know, like I got all positive tests or like three positives, one negative that didn't make sense with any diagnosis that I had studied in my book. And I excused myself for a second for the patient. I said, hey, I'll be right back. Go outside. I talked to my instructor, my supervisor, and I say, hey, man, you know, I did all these special tests.

Starting point is 01:36:57 Nothing makes sense. I don't know what's wrong with this person's shoulder. And he just says, well, make something up. Just give him a diagnosis. Any. And I just says, well, make something up. Just give him a diagnosis, any. And I was just so shocked. I was so shocked because I used to look up to him, right? He was a mentor. He was a supervisor. He was an instructor. And the fact that that was his answer and coupled with just the experience I had with my back pain and the lack of consistency and

Starting point is 01:37:22 responses just made it so evident that school wasn't doing what it was supposed to do for people, that we were going into a practical field with no practical knowledge, essentially. We have a bunch of knowledge that is only useful for one thing, and that's to pass the licensure test. So that's why I didn't go that route. Who are some of the people out there, if any, come to mind who have a doctorate in physical therapy, whose insights or work you track or admire, who you think do good practical work? Greg Lehman is the first one that comes to mind. How do you spell that?

Starting point is 01:38:03 Greg Lehman, L-E-H-M-A-N. Why do you say that? So he's, yeah, he's, I think the first degree he got was in chiropractic. So he went to school, studied, get his chiropractic degree. Then he went on to studying, getting a doctorate in biomechanics. And then he went back to physical therapy school. So he's done, in terms of breadth of experience and knowledge and different camps of thought, he has it all, right? He has the perspective as a chiro, he has a perspective as a scientist, conducts research in biomechanics and understands the physics of the body and then physical therapy, which is more of a science of movement. So, I mean, his lectures are absolutely amazing. He's able to incorporate a little bit of everything into the way that he treats and has a really interesting perspective. I've actually had a

Starting point is 01:38:56 few sessions with him. They're all done over Zoom. I think he very rarely practices in person, very rarely puts his hands on anyone because he's been, his whole thing is how can you deliver or how can you place the power on the patient instead of positioning yourself as a guru, as like someone that people- The savior, the savior PT. Right. So it's about giving the power to the patient and it should be about patient self-reliance, about them building a sense of autonomy and self-efficacy as early as possible, instead of having them be overly reliant on you as a therapist. So most of my sessions were an hour, an hour and a half long, and there were long discussions about a lot of

Starting point is 01:39:43 things because there's a lot of things that affect your perception of pain, like we were saying. So stress, my environment, my coping strategies, perceptions on movements and all of these things. Like a great example is, for example, if you have a paper cut on your finger, like how much importance are you going to place on that? You personally, but you probably put a bandaid on and move on and not think about it until it heals. And then the bandaid falls off and then you're fine. But a violin player gets a paper cut on their finger that they use to press on those strings and their response to pain and their association with that injury is going to

Starting point is 01:40:22 be completely different to yours because within the context and within his profession, that means a lot more to that person. So it's important going back to Greg, he places a lot of importance on those conversations. Like what does an injury mean to you in the context of your life? And that's smart. Yeah. And it's just, it's, it's super, super interesting the way that he treats. What have you changed your mind on in the last handful of years? Anything stand out? Yeah, I love telling this story. When I was in college and I stopped playing soccer, I was kind of like on this quest to rediscovering myself and finding what the next thing was going to be.

Starting point is 01:41:03 Same as far as what profession I wanted to get into. You know, you're thrown in college and you're expected to know what you want to study. That's crazy. I think there's only a handful of people that know with absolute certainty what they want to be when they grow up. You know, it's like your plastic surgeons, like those kids were playing with surgical kits when they were three and just know that that's what they love and that's what they're passionate about or have been conditioned to think that that's what they want. Either way, that wasn't my case. I had a very vague idea of where I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to be, you know, a public figure. I knew I wanted to lecture. I knew I wanted to write a book.

Starting point is 01:41:39 I knew I wanted to be a professional athlete, but I wasn't necessarily attached to any one route or any one path. So for the longest time, I spent a long time in this discovery period or sampling period where I would get into something. I would try it for sometimes for a long time, sometimes for a short time, and then I would quit and move on to the next thing. But it was strategic quitting. Just, I didn't know it at the time. And the person I was dating at that time, my ex-boyfriend, he one time he's I remember I got a specialized bike because I wanted to get into triathlons. And he criticized that a lot. He said, Steph, why are you investing so much money into a bike when everything you try,

Starting point is 01:42:18 you quit almost immediately. You're a quitter. And that was that was shocking to me, especially coming from someone, you know, so close to me that he was calling me a quitter. And that was, that was shocking to me, especially coming from someone's, you know, so close to me that he was calling me a quitter. And I just didn't, I didn't identify myself as a quitter. I would feel like it was the complete opposite. I, you know, I'm resilient, I'm persistent, I'm consistent. Now I'm not a quitter, but I was right. Like within the classical definition of quitting. Yeah, it was, I was trying a bunch of different things and quitting a bunch of things. But like I said, it was more strategic than anything. I was just trying to, trying to discover myself and what I'm good at. And the way I think about it is there's kind of

Starting point is 01:42:54 like in my head, how I separate it is there's three kind of components to finding something that you're good at. You have your, your skills, your talents, and your passions. And what you're essentially trying to do is find the best balance of the three. You shouldn't hope to put, again, all of your eggs in one basket. It's not only about what you're passionate about, which is part of the worst advice that people can give you is do what you love. I couldn't disagree with that more because it's about finding that balance between your skills. So it's the, your skills are something that you can work at, that you can, you see progress when you practice it. Your talents is an inherent ability. So something that you're born with, like for example, I was born like physiologically to have the capability to get

Starting point is 01:43:43 stronger. So that's, that's the talent I have. That's something that you can't really teach. And then a passion is something that you're interested in. The funny thing is that when your skills and talents match up, you can start developing a passion for that because everyone likes to be successful. So you can start developing a passion or a love for something that you didn't know you're passionate about just because you are, you're, you're standing out from the crowd. So for me, that sampling period was so important because I was able to find stuff that I was really, really good at sports that I was really, really good at, um, in a profession that I was really, really good at because I was curious because the way that I think about things was scientific. And I was able to excel in those things because I sampled. So the notion that winners never quit is just so

Starting point is 01:44:33 flawed. It's such a fallacy and it does such a disservice to people because it discourages people from trying new things because they're afraid that they're, they're not going to like it, or they're going to be bad at it, or they're afraid to fail. And the reality is that it's, it's a good thing. It's a good thing, especially when you quit for the right reasons. So what, what are the right reasons to quitting is when you identify that there's like an upper limit for where you can get, you know, you're, you identify maybe something within yourself that you, that you won't be able to overcome, that you just won't be able to be better than your competition versus quitting for the wrong reasons, which is quitting when you

Starting point is 01:45:16 first encounter resistance, you know, that's cowardly because things are going to get tough at some point. You just got to know, you just got to be very strategic. Again, like I said, of when you're quitting and not being afraid to quit for those reasons. And I think I read this on, I believe it's The Dip by Seth Godin, the sunk cost fallacy. So it's basically when you've invested some time or money into something, it kind of tricks you into not wanting to leave it because perceptually you're like, oh, I've already spent all this time. It's what happened to me in PT school. I think that's one of the reasons why I didn't quit was because I had already invested a year of my life and a year of tuition into that. And I was like,

Starting point is 01:46:00 I might as well stay. Obviously there were other reasons for me to stay. And it ended up being really positive for me. But that's what keeps people in jobs they hate. That's what keeps people from not taking a risk and starting their own business or not switching sports or careers or friendships or partners. So winners never quit and quitters never win. False in the life experience of Steffi Cohen. And by the way, yeah, she's broken 25 world records. So most of y'all can just shut the fuck up. So yeah, although it does take a certain sensitivity and degree of refined

Starting point is 01:46:41 perception and self-awareness to identify what you are good at and not trick yourself into thinking that you are just sampling when in fact you are stopping due to pain or discomfort or setbacks or plateaus, right? So it does require a certain amount of reflection to go through that sampling period and then double down and triple down on a few areas or one area where you truly have an advantage that you can learn to love. It does take some awareness. Absolutely. And you'll make that poor decision sometimes. For example, I think I made the wrong decision when it came to soccer. The reason why I stopped playing soccer, I think, wasn't the right one. If there's one thing I could change about my past, it would have been to try harder.

Starting point is 01:47:31 With soccer? Yeah. Let's talk about something that popped up when I was texting with a few people who know you. Adi Kaju prompted me to ask about time management, whether it was all time well invested or not. You completed your doctorate while training to break 25 world records and simultaneously creating a successful business, which I think we haven't spent a whole lot of time on, but you have built and scaled business very successfully. So you're doing all of those things simultaneously, at least at one point in time.

Starting point is 01:48:12 How do you think about time management or what are some of the key components to doing that much simultaneously? What sacrifices are made or how would you encourage people to think about it? Because that does seem to be unusual, the capacity to do that. I actually, I love this question because I have a very non-traditional answer. I think a lot of quote unquote high achievers or high performers have this seemingly very well constructed and organized weekly, monthly, yearly schedules where everything's planned. They have like, you know, times where they do certain things and times where they don't, times where they, whatever. They seem to be very organized. And for a long time, I tried to be that way. Read things like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and The Four-Hour Workweek. And I was always-

Starting point is 01:49:00 Yeah. Burn that second one. Terrible advice. Yeah. And I just felt so frustrated because I didn't feel like I was like everyone else. So to a certain extent, I felt like I was an imposter. I'm a lazy, successful person. That's how I would feel. I'm pretending that I have all the habits of all these successful people when in reality, I'm not like them. I do things very differently. I don't do well with inflexible schedules. I don't have an agenda that's all color-coded and highlighted. I don't have morning ritual. I really don't. I'm more of like a free spirit. I'm a procrastinator. I'm unorganized. My mind is all over the place. Hold on though. I mean, that having been said, it's not like you're just eating Cheetos and watching reruns of Seinfeld and smoking out of a bong all day when you're getting a DPT and the training and the successful business done at the same time.

Starting point is 01:49:58 So as a free spirit, how the hell does that get done? Right. So, I mean, just for the longest time, I tried to be like other people and I just found that it's just not, it wasn't going to work for me. So the way I do things is I focus on the task at hand. So what do I need to do right now to either finish a project or to move in the right direction. And I do that. And I used to cycle it based on prioritizing. So for example, while I was in physical therapy school, I knew that there would come weeks of increased workload when I was doing practicals or when I was doing, or there was a thesis or there were midterms or final exams, I knew those times were high

Starting point is 01:50:45 stress. And I knew that whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to spend extra time inside studying, which is why I actually built a home gym in my living room when I was in PT school in a second floor apartment. It's probably not the smartest thing to do. Your neighbors downstairs loved you. They hated me. They thought I was insane. But yeah, that's what I had to do. So when those times would come in, pressure was on, it was time to study. I would just come to terms with, except that training was going to take the backseat and hybrid and my business was going to take the backseat for those two weeks while I

Starting point is 01:51:23 focused on this one very important thing, which is staying in school, which was more difficult than it sounds because they had a very strict policy where if you got anything less than a 75% on any test, you would get kicked out, which I did. But- We're going to have to come back to that. Okay, continue. So yeah, I just focused on the task at hand. If there were tests coming up, I would focus all my energy on that and I would train as much as I could, whether it was a 10-minute workout or a 20-minute workout, it didn't matter. And I didn't feel pressured to spend any more time at the gym because I knew that once the midterms or finals were done, I was going to have more time. And then when that was done,

Starting point is 01:52:05 I would double down on my training and on my business. I would skip class. I would spend four or five hours at the gym. I would do double sessions when I had the time. So I just basically played it by ear. I did what I had to do when I had to do it. And somehow everything got done. It sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're very good at single tasking, right? You're not multitasking. You're not doing 17 different things in a given day. You are identifying for the next two or four weeks or two months or four months, whatever

Starting point is 01:52:34 it might be, what the most important thing is to move forward. And then you just basically drop everything else and maybe not drop, but you focus almost all of your energy on that one thing. Exactly. You get kicked out of school. This is for getting less than 75 on a test? That was a horrific experience, let me tell you. So I've never failed a test in my life, even though in college I wasn't that applied, in high school I wasn't that applied. I somehow always pass my tests. I'm like a B plus student. And somehow I failed this test of the silliest class ever. You know,

Starting point is 01:53:11 that class that you think to yourself, ah, this is such an easy test. I don't even have to study. That was the, that was that type of class. And I took my test. I disconnected completely. I went to Canada for Christmas with, with Hayden, with my fiance. Didn't think about school at all. Then all of a sudden I get back home, you know, two or three weeks later and there's a pile, a pile of letters from the head of the school and head administrator of the school. And I'm like, oh my God, this is not good. I opened them up and basically it was the first one that said, hi, you have seven days to submit an appeal. You failed.

Starting point is 01:53:49 I think it was evaluation treatments and evaluation class with a 74. You have to submit an appeal in seven days. Otherwise you're going to be dismissed from the program. And then there was letters like every day after that day saying, you know, we haven't heard from you. We're taking you out of the roster. We're taking you out of the roster. We're taking you out of the class. We're kicking you out of the program because we didn't hear from you, essentially. And that was the most terrifying moment of my life. I just felt like such a loser.

Starting point is 01:54:14 I felt like I was, you know, getting kicked out of school. That's big. Anyway, you know, I made an appointment to speak with the head of admissions and to speak with the entire committee of academic review. And they ended up giving me an appointment, giving me an opportunity to appeal. Given the circumstances, I didn't really know that they were trying to contact me. I just kind of disconnected. I didn't expect to fail a test, I guess. And I sat down in a room with, I guess there were 15 or 20 professors. It was a round table, huge round table. And I'm in the middle and pretty much, you know, I'm just being asked, why do I deserve a second chance? Why they should let me back in? Why do I think I failed? What am I going to do different? But the question or the statement, I guess that stood out to me the most was this one professor,

Starting point is 01:55:03 his name's Dr. Feibert, which by the way, I love him now. And I think I love him more because he challenged me. I guess that's how I, that's how I perform my best when there's a challenge, when people don't believe in me. So he stared at me right in the eye and he goes, Steph, I just think the problem here is that you're not as strong as a student as you think you are. And I think you're going to have to make the decision between becoming a professional athlete or becoming a professional student, but I don't think you're capable of doing both. And I just looked at him in the eyes and I said, Professor Feinberg, you know, with all due respect, I appreciate your, your criticism, but I just, I have to disagree with that statement.

Starting point is 01:55:39 I think what happened was a fluke. I think I'm more than capable as a student. I think I'm more than capable to do both things. I just wasn't focused on the right thing. I wish something happened with that test. I didn't focus enough, didn't study enough, but I think I'm capable of doing it. And they ended up granting me a second chance. But from there on, that was my first, second semester of grad school. And from there on, I just, my professors were all up in my ass basically for the, until, until I graduated. Cause they just thought I was this rebel. I would, I would get to school more often than not late, probably from training with a barbell in my hand. Cause I would train at noon as well.

Starting point is 01:56:18 So I would take the lunch break to train. You carried your barbell with you? Carried my barbell. Don't call me a meathead. I'm just carrying my barbell around the class. Don't mind me. There's nothing to see here. Yeah. And meanwhile, my spine professor would be like, you're going to break your back doing all those deadlifts. People thought I was crazy. But yeah, I made it. I didn't fail a single more test for the entire three years was the most, honestly, the most stressful three years of my

Starting point is 01:56:50 life, just because I felt like getting kicked out was so eminent. You know, I just felt like I was one slip away from being kicked out. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I made it. But you made it, you made it and, and much more. So let's, let's do a few more questions and then we can, we can bring around round one to a close. I know we didn't get a chance to talk about diet.

Starting point is 01:57:16 You're exceptionally expert in diets. We haven't had a chance to discuss that. We haven't had a chance to talk about boxing. There's a lot that there's a lot we could explore. We're not going to have a chance to explore today. But let me ask you two things. Aside from school and the failing of that test, do you have any favorite failures that you learned a lot from or that set you up for, in some way, later success? Could be also a dark period, but just anything particularly challenging that comes to mind that in some way ended up helping you?

Starting point is 01:57:52 Yeah. So actually, my favorite quote, and this is the only quote I have memories, is, each fresh crisis is an opportunity in disguise. I can't remember where I first read it, but it resonated with me so much because honestly, every single time I've failed at something, it's been the best, worst thing that has ever happened to me. It's opened so many doors and so many new opportunities. When you look for them, they're there. So I think every single time I've experienced any sort of failure, I've been able to get out of it better than ever. I guess one of the most biggest ones was getting kicked out of school and just having to like reframe how I thought about school and how I studied and my habits andS. on my own, you know, starting with like a 2.5 GPA, not knowing if I was going to be able to stay in school, not understanding the language, having to take multiple steps back in several classes, retake classes that led me to discover other passions. Well, you're bombing out in that competition, probably, in some way. Yeah. Failed relationships, infidelity issues with partners that led me to kind of rediscover myself and change my perceptions on relationships and what kind of things I can do better to be a better partner.

Starting point is 01:59:18 Friendships ending, failed friendships, failed relationships with my family, with my dad. That all ended up teaching me a ton. You know, I think that society glorifies happiness. Society glorifies, you know, being in a good mood and being happy and being positive and fails to acknowledge the important lessons that happen when you're going through dark periods of time, when you're going through tough times. And so, I mean, those are so important. Look at the beginning of this year, when the pandemic first started, I did my last powerlifting competition of this year in February and my back pain got exacerbated a lot. I did a massive weight cut. I cut like 20 pounds in a period of like two weeks. I broke some world

Starting point is 02:00:00 records and then my back was flared up worse than ever. And it's upsetting. It's frustrating, especially after, you know, I wrote a book about back pain and I'm having a hard time managing it. So I fell into this really deep depression because I felt like my identity was being stripped out of me. My identity as an athlete, my identity as a high level top performer, my identity as an authority in academia when it comes to back pain identity as an authority in academia, when it comes to back pain, when it comes to injuries, when it comes to strength training, I felt like

Starting point is 02:00:29 I didn't know what I was talking about anymore because I couldn't even figure it out for myself. And, you know, that coupled that with, with the pandemic, everything closing off, I felt like my life was just kind of spiraling downwards out of control. I spent a couple of weeks like that, just feeling pity for myself, feeling really bad about the situation, about the cards that I was dealt, about my back, about potentially not being able to lift again. I didn't know about the livelihood of my business. How is the pandemic going to impact my income and all of these other things that just created an insurmountable amount of anxiety for me. And I think when that passes, I think it's like just, it's part of the process to go through those a couple of weeks or a month. I do believe it's important to give yourself a time cap for how long you're going to feel bad for yourself because otherwise you just end up stuck in that phase for way too long. So I remember just making the conscious decision to stop feeling bad about myself and about my situation and trying to, to see the positive

Starting point is 02:01:29 and the opportunities that lied within that. So when it came to sports, I bought a heavy bag and I put it in my garage and that led to Kareem, my new coach, reaching out to me and wanting to make me a pro fighter that opened, you know, the possibility for me to get into a new sport. And then the pandemic closed the door for networking. For example, that was a big part of how I gained exposure. I traveled for podcasts. I lectured, I, um, appeared on YouTube videos. That was a big competitions were canceled. So I initially was really worried about how that was going to impact my ability to continue growing my business and growing my social platform and I guess my personal brand.

Starting point is 02:02:10 So I doubled down on other things. Like we created a whole series of masterclasses that we're starting to offer. We created like five courses. We finished our coach's certification for hybrid where we're writing a manuscript, a full textbook. We invested in our team. We found new software developers. We, you know, we did so many good things for the business that I guess we wouldn't have

Starting point is 02:02:34 done if everything stayed the same. And it ended up being everything was okay. You know, and I think it's that change of mindset, that change of trying to find the opportunities within what seems like the worst thing that could have ever happened to you. And they're always there. It's just a matter of changing your attitude, your perception of what failure is and finding ways to see the beauty in that failure and what kind of opportunities present on the other side. Each fresh crisis is an opportunity in disguise. Good advice. Good maxim for life in general and fingers crossed for 2021.

Starting point is 02:03:16 But no matter what transpires, yeah. Always, always looking for the opportunity hidden in the crisis. Excellent advice. Steph, this has been so much fun. People can find you all over the place, hybridperformancemethod.com, Instagram at Steffi Cohen, S-T-E-F-I-C-O-H-E-N on YouTube. You have your podcast, Hybrid Unlimited.

Starting point is 02:03:40 Is there anything else you would like to say or ask of the audience? Any closing comments? Anything at all that you'd like to share before we what do you do when you have an injury? Like step by step. Do you want me to go through that like quickly? Yeah. I'll do just one, two, three, four, five, six, like the bullet points. Lightning round. Yes. So when you're hurt,

Starting point is 02:04:13 these are the six things that you should be doing. Any injury, this applies to any injury. The first thing is stop doing what hurts. It seems like commonsensical, but at the same time is something that a lot of people trick themselves into thinking they don't need. That's definitely always the first step. So take a step back and don't be afraid of taking some time off. You know, you take one step back, two steps forward kind of thing. Don't underestimate isometric exercises or seemingly

Starting point is 02:04:39 simple exercises because it's all about delivering positive movement experiences when you're in pain. So it's about finding movements that feel good to you and that don't exacerbate your pain. Increasing the amount of aerobic activity that you do. So walking more, moving more in general. There's a saying in PT that's I think overstated, but motion is lotion. And that is true. You know, the more that you move, more blood flow goes into your joints, the better it is. And the more you avoid that deconditioning loop, because what a lot of people tend to do when they're in pain is they stop moving altogether because they think that that's what they need. But bed rest and immobilization is all outdated. You want to move as much as you can, essentially. Using pain to optimize your movement. So the way that I think about it is kind of like a

Starting point is 02:05:25 stoplight. Zero to three out of 10 of pain means go. Three to six means warning. And over six means definitely don't do that. So use pain to inform your training decisions and the movements that you do. Once you've done all of that, you got to turn off the pain alarm. So for a period of time, it's okay to avoid certain movements, but then you shouldn't be avoiding movements forever. So starting to expose yourself to tolerable ranges of motion and tolerable movements that don't make your pain worse so that you can get back to the movements that you used to do that bring joy to your life. And then understanding the final one is understanding that tissue adaptation takes time.

Starting point is 02:06:01 So sometimes we're married to this very rigid healing times that we see on the internet. We're like, okay, how long does it take for an elbow injury to heal? Okay. Two to four weeks. And then four weeks go by and you're still in pain and you think something's wrong with you. But oftentimes nothing's wrong with you. You just have different sensitivities to pain and different ways that we deal with it and different healing times. And so just don't rush the process and understand that everyone experiences pain and injuries at a different speed. That's it. And that's it. The new book is back in motion. I've been very impressed with a lot of the writing and can't wait to see what you do next, especially with boxing. Looking forward to seeing the infighting.

Starting point is 02:06:46 Me too. And I would not want to get punched by you. So I will remain on the sidelines clapping like a fanboy. We've mentioned a couple of different options for people to find you. Are there any other places or resources you'd like to mention? No, that's all. Cover them all. All right.

Starting point is 02:07:04 Well, Steph, thank you so much for taking the time today to be on the show. And to everyone listening, we will have links to all the topics, all the people, all the books, all the exercises, and so on that came up today. You'll be able to find those as usual at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, each fresh crisis is an opportunity in disguise. Keep it in mind. Enjoy variability, pay attention to your GPP, and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the

Starting point is 02:07:52 weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.

Starting point is 02:08:24 So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #491: Dr. Stefi Cohen — 25 World Records, Power Training, Deadlifting 4.4x Bodyweight, Sports Psychology, Overcoming Pain, and More

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #491: Dr. Stefi Cohen — 25 World Records, Power Training, Deadlifting 4.4x Bodyweight, Sports Psychology, Overcoming Pain, and More

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.